The following patents or publications are noted and are hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety:
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,371,615, and 5,357,352, teach a method and apparatus for image-dependent color shifting in electronic documents of color shifted natural scene images.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,363,209, discloses a method and apparatus for improving the appearance of a digitally encoded image having a pictorial scene, and more particularly, a method for improving sharpness within a digitally encoded image having a pictorial scene.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,347,374, is directed toward a method and apparatus for improving the appearance of a digital image having a pictorial scene, and more particularly, toward improving processing time and image quality of an image which is processed by multiple cascaded processing elements.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,450,502, and 5,414,538, teach a method and apparatus for improving the appearance of a digital image having a pictorial scene, and more particularly, a method for improving the contrast within the pictorial screen.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,450,217, discloses a method and apparatus for image-dependent color saturation correction in natural scene color electronic pictures.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,628,843, to Eschbach, et al., issued Sep. 30, 2003 for “Image Enhancement on JPEG Compressed Image Data,” teaches a method and apparatus for image enhancement of JPEG compressed image data.
NTX™ Large Format Digital Printing Software, published by Xerox Corporation, © 1998,, which described Xerox ColorgrafX NTX full featured RIP and print software (NTX RIP Software), including automated image quality enhancement.
In production printing, the verification of print data is a common functionality. The pre-press checking tasks include the verification of the existence and accessibility of all document elements, such as fonts and images, the readability of all included formats, etc. An example of such functionality is found in MarkzNet™ as described at http://www.creativepro.com/story/news/11767.html.
In production printing it remains necessary for the producer to “warrant” the correct reproduction of the user content and data, including images. Current pre-press checking extends to the verification of image sizes and resolutions to warrant print quality. However, it is often the case that images are of poor quality, and despite perfect rendering of the input image data, will lead to customer dissatisfaction, even if the images have the correct format and resolution. Common problems with images that cannot simply be identified by current tools are image defects or artifacts, such as improper exposure, poor color balance and/or saturation, lacking sharpness, and the like. In such cases, re-work and lost profits are the end result as the customer is often not “charged” for the full extent of the costs incurred by the production printing shop. As will be apparent from the following description, the term “image attributes” is used to indicate visual attributes of images, such as sharpness, contrast, color balance, as distinguished from image format attributes that relate to file formats, resolutions, etc.
On the other hand, software products such as Xerox' FreeFlow™, or Xerox DocuSP and print software described above is capable, to a certain extent, for analyzing documents and associated images and to automatically make adjustments in image characteristics (e.g., sharpness, color balance and saturation) to improve poor quality images. The system and method described herein take such functions to a higher level, and include not only the analysis of several image characteristics (edge sharpness, color fidelity, saturation, exposure, contrast) alone and in combination, but also include a more rigorous review of such characteristics to determine if intervention is necessary. Then, if necessary, the system and method enable automated and/or manual intervention in order to assure that the output is likely to be acceptable to the customer. It is understood, that manual operation also preferably includes the case where the user applies or agrees to the processing suggested by the system in the process of analyzing the image data.
The motivation is that in print-for-pay or similar scenarios, an expert intervention is normally desired or required if the print data is to be modified. This is to avoid unintended consequences of automated systems. For example, the “bad image” might have intentionally been bad to contrast it with a “good image” somewhere else in the document. It is therefore required that the intended automatic process is verified with a user and that the user can decide on the processing, based on the severity of the processing. For example, small modifications might always be enabled, large ones might always require user input, and/or based on the user preference and job settings (e.g.: jobs for a specific customer will only create user intervention requests for certain operations, whereas jobs for a different customer will always require intervention for changes).
Disclosed in embodiments herein is a method for processing a document for rendering, comprising the steps of: analyzing the content of the document prior to rendering for at least one image attribute; determining, based upon the analyzing step, a confidence that the rendering of the document will produce a desirable output; based upon the confidence, carrying out an adjustment of the document; and rendering the document. It is to be understood that a document might contain any number of images or image-type objects and that analyzing the document always includes the identification of image-tape objects.
Also disclosed in embodiments herein is a method for analyzing a document prior to rendering to determine a confidence that the document will be correctly rendered, comprising the steps of: analyzing the content of the document prior to rendering for a plurality of image attributes; determining an aggregate confidence that rendering of the document will produce a desirable output, including (a) comparing the image attributes as analyzed to at least a first boundary condition associated with each attribute, such that each comparison produces a result that indicates whether the attribute meets the first boundary condition, and (b) aggregating the results from the step of comparing the attributes to the associated first boundary conditions, and taking the aggregate as an aggregate confidence; comparing the image attributes as analyzed to at least a second boundary condition associated with each attribute, such that each comparison produces a result that indicates whether the attribute meets the second boundary condition; if the aggregate confidence and comparison of image attributes indicates the attributes meet all of the second boundary conditions, rendering the document; and otherwise carrying out an adjustment of the document.
Also disclosed in embodiments herein is a system for processing a document to determine if the document will produce a desired result, comprising: port for receiving document data including image data that represents an input digital image; memory for storing said image data; a processor, capable of accessing said memory, for carrying out an analysis of at least one attribute of the image, said processor further determining, based upon the analysis, a confidence that the rendering of the image data will produce a desirable output; an image adjustment system, responsive to the confidence, for carrying out an adjustment of the image; and an output device for rendering the document.